R W Apple 1934 – 2006: Profile

Calvin Trillin | New Yorker | 2003 

There is a consensus in the trade, I am pleased to report, that Johnny Apple—R. W. Apple, Jr., of the New York Times—is a lot easier to take now than he once was. Even Apple believes that. When I asked him not long ago about the paragraph in Gay Talese’s 1969 book on the Times, “The Kingdom and the Power,” which presents him as a brash young eager beaver, he said it was, alas, “quite an accurate portrait,” although he doesn’t recall boasting in the newsroom that while covering the war in Vietnam he had personally killed a few Vietcong—the remark that, in Talese’s account, led an older reporter to say, “Women and children, I presume.” In speaking of those early days, Apple said, “I was desperate to prove myself.”

You could argue, I suppose, that, in the words of a longtime colleague, “he doesn’t have to argue the case anymore.” In a forty-year career with the newspaper, he has been a political reporter whose stories at times seemed to set the agenda for a Presidential campaign; a war reporter who led the Times coverage in Vietnam for two years in the late sixties, and its coverage of the Gulf War a quarter of a century later; a foreign correspondent who has been in a hundred and nine countries (yes, he keeps a tally); the newspaper’s premier writer of analytical pieces from Washington; and, these days, a wide-ranging writer on culture and travel and, especially, food. Of course, it’s always possible that Apple’s accomplishments are not, in fact, the principal source of his mellowing. There are any number of other theories about what might account for descriptions of the mature Apple that actually employ the word “endearing”—theories that include the possibility that we’ve simply grown used to him. “It’s like having a big old Labrador dog,” Jim Wooten, of ABC, said recently of Apple. “He knocks over the lamp with his tail. He slobbers on everything. But you still love him.”

It is certainly true that Apple, at sixty-eight, could hardly be described as having shyly withdrawn from the spotlight. In a trade whose flamboyant characters are increasingly in short supply, he is still so widely discussed among reporters that Apple stories constitute a subgenre of the journalistic anecdote. Apple stories often portray R. W. Apple, Jr., checking into a hotel so staggeringly expensive that no other reporter would dare mention it on his expense account, or confidently knocking out a complicated lead story at a political convention as the deadline or the dinner hour approaches, or telling a sommelier that the wine won’t do (even if the sommelier has brought out the most distinguished bottle in that part of Alabama), or pontificating on architecture or history or opera or soccer or horticulture. He still travels grandly and eats prodigiously. In Apple stories that take place in restaurants or hotels or even newsrooms, the verb used to describe his manner of entry is normally “swept in.”

Although people often find him charming, he is still capable of reducing a news clerk or a waiter or a campaign travel coördinator to tears now and then—like an ogre past his scariest days who just wants to keep his hand in. All in all, I can imagine that people who meet R. W. Apple, Jr., for the first time in his maturity might assume that some time-travel production of “The Man Who Came to Dinner” had managed to land Sir John Falstaff for the role of Sheridan Whiteside.

Physically, Apple is more noticeable than ever. He has a round face and a pug nose that give him a rather youthful appearance; a former colleague once said that when Apple flashes his characteristic look of triumph he resembles “a very big four-year-old.” His form reflects the eating habits of someone who has been called Three Lunches Apple, a nickname he likes. Andrew Rosenthal, now the deputy editorial-page editor of the Times, once said that Johnny Apple had the best mind and the worst body in American journalism. Apple famously sees to his early-morning tasks—sending off a flurry of e-mails, perusing his investments, absorbing the newspapers—while encased in one of the brightly striped nightshirts made for him by Harvie & Hudson, of Jermyn Street, the same firm that makes his dress shirts, so that a house guest not yet fully recovered from a late night at the Apple table can be startled by the impression that a particularly festive party tent has somehow found its way indoors.

Apple’s method of locomotion—which he accomplishes in short, almost dainty steps—has some resemblance to a man carefully steering a large stomach down a narrow path that is being cleared at that very moment by native bearers; it is easily mistaken for a swagger. He speaks with as much authority as he ever did, whether the conversation is on the foreign policy of John Foster Dulles or on which three zinfandels are the zinfandels worth drinking. To characterize the great man’s speaking style, collectors of Apple stories often use the phrase “holding forth,” although he is also, truth be told, someone who takes in just about everything everyone else in the conversation says and files it away in what Morley Safer, of CBS, who has been a friend of Apple’s since they were in Vietnam together, calls “that Palm Pilot of a brain he has.” On the whole, what Apple says while holding forth is considered by his friends worth listening to. The way Ben Bradlee, the former editor of the Washington Post, puts it is “I’d like to hear Apple on almost any subject, reserving the right to tell him he’s full of shit.”

During Apple’s early days on the paper, he was resented by his colleagues for getting plum assignments without going through the seven levels of purgatory then expected of new boys at the Times. To some people in the newsroom, his enthusiasm seemed indistinguishable from buttering up superiors. It didn’t help that Apple’s contemporaries on the paper were under the impression that he was making more money than they were. “Apple bragged he was being paid fifty dollars more than he actually was, which would have made him the highest-salaried reporter in the city room, except for Homer Bigart,” Arthur Gelb, then the deputy metropolitan editor, writes in his forthcoming memoir, “City Room.” (As Apple remembers it, he did get paid more than the others, the Times having matched his salary when he came over from NBC, and word spread through an overheard telephone conversation.) It probably also didn’t help that Apple seemed not to notice the effect that all of this was having on his colleagues. “A cape buffalo is what a cape buffalo is,” Jim Wooten told me, at which point I limited him to two animal images in discussing Apple. “It rambles through the brush. It eats what it wants to eat. It does whatever it wants to do, without knowing how much other animals resent it.”

Early on, Apple was jumped over more senior reporters to become the Times bureau chief in Albany. “John had developed skills that none of us yet had,” I was told by Sydney Schanberg, who was in the bureau, but “he needed training in socialization issues.” One of the other reporters in the bureau was Doug Robinson, who became the city editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Robinson, now retired, would not be thought of as someone who always took a completely respectful view of people he worked for, having got into the habit at one point in his Times career of calling the executive editor a “borderline psychotic” and describing the managing editor, the second-in-command, as “a man who couldn’t find kitty litter in a cat box.” In Albany, Robinson recalls, Johnny Apple was resented partly for an air of superiority that was galling to the other reporters, “particularly when they realized, upon sober reflection, that he was superior. That was the part that was the hardest to take—that he was so damn good.”

Robinson was the protagonist of what I’m tempted to call the authorized version of the most often told Apple story: Statehouse reporters who hung out at a local bar, having decided that their conversation was overly dominated by complaints about Johnny Apple, agreed that anyone who mentioned Apple’s name would have to put a quarter in a drink fund—an agreement that made cocktail hour more soothing until, as Robinson recalled recently, “I came in, and I said, ‘That son of a bitch! He’s done it again!’ And I pulled out a whole fistful of quarters, laid them on the table, and excoriated Apple for fifteen minutes.”

Apple stories often come in multiple versions, and a lot of tales that may not be true have attached themselves to him, in the way that a lot of quotes have attached themselves to, say, Dorothy Parker or Yogi Berra. Correcting some of them recently, Apple said that it’s not true that he conspired on his first honeymoon to book a cabin on a ship to Naples next to the cabin of the then publisher, Arthur (Punch) Sulzberger (Apple insists that the booking was coincidental). He says he never owned part of a British football team and never chartered a plane to catch up with a political campaign after oversleeping, although he has chartered some planes in his time. It is not true that he once put in for a fur coat on an expense account from Iceland, or maybe Greenland, and, having had that item rejected, filed expenses for the same total again without mentioning the coat and attached a note saying, “Find it.” (That’s an old chestnut told about any number of foreign correspondents; Apple’s coat was down, was bought in Finland, and was paid for by the Times.) It is not true that in the most recent political convention in Los Angeles he stayed in a suite at the Bel-Air while just about everyone else from the Times was at a charmless commercial hotel; he says that the room he stayed in at the Bel-Air, being decently commodious, may simply have given the impression of being a suite.

Apple now tells Apple stories on himself. In a speech at the Century Club not long ago, he said that when he arrived at Princeton he decided it might be advantageous to claim a home town with a bit more cachet than Akron (“just till I got my feet on the ground”), and chose one he’d seen mentioned in the golf results as the home of the Winged Foot Golf Club. Unfortunately, he had never heard the name of the place pronounced, and was thus able to set off great hilarity among a group of Eastern-boarding-school graduates—the sort that some Midwestern high-school boys at Princeton then referred to as Tweedy Shitballs—by saying that he was from “Mamma-ronn-nick.”

He knows Apple stories about his girth and Apple stories about his tendency to hold forth—a state that Tom Brokaw has referred to as being “in full Apple.” He loves the story about a dinner-table conversation early in his experience as a stepfather. His first marriage had broken up in the seventies, in Washington, when he fell in love with Betsey Brown, a charming woman who speaks in the sort of plummy accent heard among Richmond débutantes discussing cocktail napkins but happens to be a Bryn Mawr graduate who reads more newspapers than Apple does. She was also married, and she had two children. (“Within a limited social circle in Washington,” Apple now says, “I think it would be fair to say that it was a brief but fairly vivid scandal.”)

A trip to Europe had not completely melted the hearts of the children, John and Catherine Brown, who were unaccustomed to being herded through quite that many cathedrals that intently by someone with that much information at his fingertips and that many reference books in his satchel. Then, at dinner one evening, an American Indian design on Betsey’s dress inspired the assigning of Indian names, until everyone had one but R. W. Apple, Jr. “That’s easy,” John Brown, who was then about nine, finally said. “You’re Sitting Bullshit.” As Catherine tells the story, there was a moment of shocked silence, and then “Johnny gave one of his full-body laughs.” After that, the children felt free to name Apple’s stomach—Eugene, and, eventually, Eugene Maximus.

In support of the notion that Apple is something like a lovable old Labrador, it should be said that many Apple stories portray him as enormously generous—generous with his hospitality and generous with the telephone numbers of his sources and generous with his good offices at the Times for someone he thinks should work there and generous with his restaurant recommendations (“The only place in Scotland to have Scottish beef is in Linlithgow, and here’s the name of the owner . . .”). The political-campaign reporters who rode one bus or another with him—people like Richard Cohen, of the Washington Post, and Curtis Wilkie, of the Boston Globe, and Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, of the Baltimore Sun—liked to play jokes on him and liked to complain about him, but, as Germond said recently, “Most of us had an affection for John, even when he was at his most bumptious.”

A Times contemporary of Apple’s has pointed out that the Apple stories that “make you shudder” tend to date back to the sixties. A number of them were collected in “The Boys on the Bus,” Timothy Crouse’s book on the reporters covering the 1972 Presidential campaign—a book that served for years as the standard text on R. W. Apple, Jr. “Read one way, the book is immensely flattering to me,” Apple told me. “Read another way, it basically says I’m an asshole.” The book angered Apple—although one Apple-mellowing theory holds that it did him the favor of providing the cape buffalo a glimpse of how some of the other animals might view him.

What was flattering to Apple in “The Boys on the Bus” was, by and large, its discussion of his competence as a reporter. A McGovern worker was quoted describing his first glimpse of how the national press operates: “Johnny Apple of the New York Times sat in a corner and everyone peered over his shoulder to find out what he was writing.” Apple’s competitors give him mixed reviews on the 1972 campaign—some of them believe he became too attached to the string of endorsements that Edmund Muskie was accumulating—but virtually all of them say, without being asked, that his campaign coverage four years later was worthy of a Pulitzer, a prize he has never won. David Broder, of the Washington Post, told me that in 1976 Apple “damn near invented the Iowa caucuses” as a serious element of the Presidential campaign—it was Apple who first spotted the potential strength of Jimmy Carter—and after that, as Curtis Wilkie has put it, “he ran rings around everyone.”

What Crouse referred to as Apple’s “braggadocio, his grandstanding, his mammoth ego” dominated the portrait in “The Boys on the Bus.” An account of Apple’s first meeting with David Halberstam is fairly typical of Crouse’s Apple stories. It describes Apple sauntering over to Halberstam’s desk to inform him, at some length, that at a party the previous evening—a party that included some Sulzberger cousins and a Times vice-president—Halberstam’s name had been mentioned quite favorably. Finally, Crouse wrote, “Halberstam said his first words to Johnny Apple: ‘Fuck off, kid!’ “

Looking back, Halberstam says of Apple’s behavior in those early days, “When it was egregious, which was often, it was never out of malice.” Halberstam believes that young reporters at the Times—most of them edgy and competitive and still not certain that they deserved to be where they seemed to have fetched up—found Apple hard to take partly because of “a fear that he symbolized your own lesser self.” That’s not far from the notion that Apple differed from his contemporaries at the Times not so much in what he was like as in the fact that he let it show—or, in Crouse’s shrewd phrase, that he stuck out “in a business populated largely by shy egomaniacs.” In Halberstam’s view, “It would be interesting to know what went on in Akron to produce this fearful insecurity—the ego, the unfinished quality that made him even worse than the rest of us.”

Unable to match his father’s athletic exploits, the younger Apple became a voracious consumer of information about sports and, eventually, the sports editor of the newspaper at Western Reserve Academy—an institution that reminds some people of a small New England boarding school in a small New England town, although the town, Hudson, is about halfway between Akron and Cleveland. By the time he got to Princeton and entered what was then called the “heeling competition” required of those who wanted to work on the Princetonian, his writing was already fluid enough to astonish his classmates—a fact he credits partly to the stern efforts of an English teacher at Reserve named Franklyn S. (Jiggs) Reardon, who, in class and on the student newspaper, demanded clear and concise prose. Young Apple had the nearly maniacal energy that eventually resulted in the back-to-back interviews and blizzard of telephone calls that characterized his political reporting. He was also displaying the sort of intense curiosity that can seem to suck all the information out of the room, although the focus of his curiosity was not always on the courses he had signed up to take.

At the time, the Princetonian had what amounted to a board of advisory grownups, and the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal—Barney Kilgore, who happened to live in Princeton—was among its members. Once Apple was informed that he would not be continuing at the university, Kilgore arranged for him to work at the Journal, and he eventually got his degree from the Columbia School of General Studies. The Journal employment lasted until there was a lengthy meeting to discuss why other bureaus were getting a certain type of piece in the paper so much more often than the New York bureau, and young Johnny Apple finally said, “Maybe they don’t have to spend their time in chickenshit meetings like this.”

At least that’s Apple’s story. I’m not sure I’d take it literally. Not that Apple is one of those reporters, much written about of late, whose copy has often been treated with some suspicion by their colleagues. (Some time before the revelations last spring that ended the editorship of Howell Raines and resulted in the departure of Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg, Apple says, he warned Raines that Bragg was such a reporter.) One foreign correspondent who often covered the same stories as Apple told me, “He’s a very good and careful writer, but when he’s talking there’s some self-aggrandizement—a need to oversell and put the best coloration on his exploits.”

When Apple is talking about a decision at the Times, for instance, his first-person plural sometimes makes the decision sound like, in the words of one colleague, “what Arthur and I worked out.” When I asked Apple the precise circumstances of his second expulsion from Princeton, he told me what he had once told Brian Lamb, of C-span, during a television interview—that it came about because he’d criticized the university administration during a campaign the Princetonian was waging against anti-Semitism in the eating-club system. Many of his contemporaries on the Princetonian remember Apple fondly as a great character among the almost willfully bland undergraduates of the fifties Ivy League, but they’re certain that nothing the newspaper wrote about the club system, a perennial target of the Prince, had anything whatever to do with his departure. Apple, when pressed, said that the dean, after citing papers unwritten and classes cut and chapel (then compulsory at Princeton) unattended, implied that some of these offenses might have been overlooked if Apple hadn’t been such a troublemaker as chairman of the Princetonian. Although it’s an oversimplification to say so, I think that people who have known Johnny Apple over the years tend to discount a bit whatever he says about himself and to trust whatever he writes in the New York Times.

In discussions of Apple-mellowing, nobody much goes for my theory that Johnny Apple was saved by gluttony. I’m still attracted by the notion, though, that his outsized supply of energy and drive and competitiveness was drained off at table, in the savoring of a decent Burgundy or the perfect crab cake. (I was present when he found what he described in the Times as his “nominee for the single best crab dish in Baltimore, if not the Western Hemisphere”—the jumbo-lump crab cake at Faidley Seafood, in the Lexington Market—and I can testify that his look of triumph did give him some resemblance to a very big four-year-old.)

Some of the people who don’t go for my theory say that Apple was a glutton to start with, and some, of course, believe that he has not yet been saved. I developed the theory in the mid-seventies, when Apple arrived in London as bureau chief. At the time, I mentioned one piece of evidence in a book, giving Apple the nom de table of Charlie Plum, as I have done in print now and then: “In an effort to find the perfect dining spot he had eaten in sixty French restaurants in London within a few months. (When Plum’s friends are asked to name his principal charms, they often mention relentlessness.)”

Even before then, Apple had a serious interest in good meals and good wine. When he was in the Washington bureau in the early seventies, before he went to London, colleagues found that a casual “Let’s get a bite of lunch” could mean going across the street to what was then one of the fanciest French restaurants in town and having a three-course meal with appropriate wine. Given the fact that most reporters think a bite of lunch has something to do with a B.L.T., Apple’s food and wine standards became an obvious target for pranks: sending a bottle of Lancer’s rosé over to his table during a political convention in Kansas City; phoning him in the guise of a fawning reader to ask his advice on the proper wine for wild, as opposed to domestic, goose; concocting a scheme in Iran to refill bottles Apple had obtained from the Shah’s cellar with what Horace Rumpole would call the local plonk.

The pranks had no effect at all on Apple’s dining habits. At some point during his long stint in London, he began putting his eating adventures into print, taking advantage of the fact that, as he puts it, “Americans, or at least New York Times readers, care about a broader spectrum of British life than they do about French or German or Japanese life.” He is not the sort of food writer who makes reservations in the name of Nero Wolfe characters or slips in quietly disguised as the Korean consul-general. In restaurants or anywhere else, Apple seems more comfortable once the people he’s dealing with are aware of his rank and station. The simplest description I’ve heard of his customary reception at a restaurant is “Everybody falls to the ground when Johnny walks in.”

The Apple-at-table stories that don’t involve his three-lunch capacity involve his standards. When his dining companion at the Kansas City restaurant, B. Drummond Ayres, then also of the Times, refused to let him send the bottle of Lancer’s away—after a long day talking to politicians and a long wait for service, Ayres was ready to start in on any tipple available—Apple hid it under the table. On a Presidential visit Bill Clinton made to Africa, Apple had dinner one night in Kampala, Uganda, whose restaurant possibilities he had, of course, researched in some depth before leaving Washington. “We go to what Johnny has found out is the best Indian restaurant in the country,” Maureen Dowd, who was in Apple’s party that evening, told me. “We’re the only ones in the restaurant. That would worry some people, but Johnny knows it’s the right place because he’s there.” After tucking in his napkin, she went on, Apple said, in stentorian tones that seemed to be addressed to no one in particular, “No prawns at this altitude!” That remains a phrase that Apple watchers occasionally use to greet each other—”No prawns at this altitude!”

“Oscar Wilde said that a man who could command a London dinner table can rule the world,” I was told not long ago by the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, who became friendly with Apple when the Apples lived in London, “and Johnny always commanded the dinner table.” Dworkin was one of the eight people gathered for Apple’s fiftieth-birthday luncheon, held at Gidleigh Park—a Devon country inn and restaurant that had been celebrated by Apple in the Times and eventually won what was apparently the first Michelin star ever awarded to an establishment run by Americans. (As a Midwesterner, albeit a Midwesterner with made-to-order English shirts, Apple is particularly proud that Paul and Kay Henderson, who run the place, both graduated from Purdue.)

In a private dining room, the celebrants, including the Hendersons, consumed Beluga caviar, sautéed foie gras with quince sauce, salad of red mullet and lettuce with olive-oil-and-coriander dressing, tagliatelle with white truffles, partridge mousse with morels and spinach, roasted saddle of hare, Muenster and single Gloucester cheeses, mango and eau-de-vie-de-poire sorbets, gâteau marjolaine, coffee, and six wines—all from 1934, the year of Apple’s birth. “Around five or five-thirty, I was as close to death by eating as I’ve ever been,” Dworkin told me. “We were about to break up and go up to the bedroom and have a nap. Then Apple was saying, ‘We have to have a talk about dinner. Just a quick word. We’ve eaten rather well. So something simple. I have an idea. The truffles that came with the tagliatelle came boxed in rice. You could make us a risotto out of the rice the truffles came in. Let’s have a Saint-Julien, a late-growth Saint-Julien. A ’79 would be all right.’ “

Much of this eating and travel is, of course, underwritten by the Times. When it comes to what Homer Bigart used to call “feeding at the Sulzberger trough,” it is widely acknowledged that R. W. Apple, Jr., is without peer. Joe Lelyveld, who even as executive editor was not known for demanding a prime position at the trough, once stopped in London when he was the foreign editor and took his bureau chief to dinner—a lavish dinner, as it turned out, since his bureau chief was R. W. Apple, Jr. When the check arrived, Apple reached over to scoop it up. “You better let me take this,” he said. “They’d never believe it coming from you.”

I once suggested to Apple that he bequeath his expense accounts to the Smithsonian Institution. “But the Times has them,” he said. “I turned them in.” He sounded a bit regretful, it seemed to me, that he was not in a position to give posterity an opportunity to inspect some of his more stunning creations. At the Times, the various departments have what is called a cost center—what amounts to a budget line. The foreign desk has a cost center. The editorial board has a cost center. R. W. Apple, Jr., has a cost center. “It’s been my fate and privilege over the years to sit next to various people who were approving Apple’s expense accounts,” Al Siegal says. “There were hoots, and once in a while you’d look up and the person—these were various assistant managing editors—was shaking his head and reading off ‘Wine from my cellars . . .’ ” Siegal, who is a great admirer of R. W. Apple, Jr., thinks that, all in all, the Times has received good value.

Asked about having his own cost center, Apple is suddenly overcome with modesty. “It’s because I write for all these different parts of the paper,” he told me. Not long ago, Apple was appointed an associate editor of the Times, a position that is something of an honorific, and some acquaintances asked what difference the new title would make, since he already seemed to do whatever he wanted. Before being named associate editor, Apple said, there were two hotels he could not stay in on his expense account. Now, as he interprets company policy, he can.

It was not the first time that Apple had lost his trademark enthusiasm for the task at hand. A decade earlier, just after he’d returned from London to be the Times’ chief Washington correspondent, there had been a period when he seemed to have lost interest in pursuing the usual political stories or even in showing up regularly at the bureau. “That was a precursor of finally deciding I just don’t want to do this again and again and again,” he told me. “I loved doing it when there was a big story running and I could make a contribution. But just to write routine political and foreign stuff, I thought, Oh man!”

Newspaper reporting of the sort that regularly results in front-page stories in the Times—that is, reporting that has to do with politics or government or foreign policy—is repetitious work. A lot of distinguished reporters eventually get the feeling that they’ve done what is essentially the same story one too many times. Some of them become columnists, but that was not in store for Apple. The absence of an ideological point of view may be an advantage in a Q-head writer but it is a disadvantage in a columnist. At the Times, Apple was regarded as someone with a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of politics, but not as a singular political thinker. Whether or not he ever yearned for a column, as some of his friends maintain, he now says that it wouldn’t have been a good fit. “I’m not any good at writing columns in which I say what this country needs or what the world needs is the following,” he told me. “I see two sides to too many things.”

The path he did take had its origin in his days in the London bureau, when he had begun to write about food and travel. Toward the end of his stint as bureau chief, he’d written a series of travel pieces in Europe—pieces that were eventually collected in a book called “Apple’s Europe.” At the time, Apple’s increasing interest in writing about bistros and cathedrals was causing some uneasiness among his masters in New York. But, looking back recently on the sort of writing he had done toward the end of his London stay, Apple said, “That was sort of the beginning of my reinventing myself.”

Not long after he stepped down as Washington bureau chief, the Times made Apple something called chief correspondent—essentially a ticket to write about whatever interested him. Betsey Apple—who, together with her children, can be thought of as another theory of what mellowed R. W. Apple, Jr.—had suggested a travel series about American cities similar to the series Apple had done in Europe. As the trips evolved, she was usually at the wheel while her husband deconstructed the maps with an adroitness that presumably comes from having had to find his way around strange cities in a hundred and nine different countries. She continued in that role in the next series, on food, in which she is routinely mentioned once in each piece, more or less in the way Hitchcock put in a fleeting appearance in each movie. Last fall, at the Southern Foodways Alliance conference on barbecue, in Oxford, Mississippi, Betsey Apple introduced herself to one of the participants by saying, “I’m Betsey. I drive Mister Daisy.”

Apple watchers have interpreted Apple’s emergence as a food writer in a number of ways. Some of them see it as the Times rewarding so many years of extraordinary service by putting Apple out to a particularly luxuriant pasture. Some see it as Apple’s response to having been deprived of the few rewards of the business that have not been bestowed on him—a column or a Pulitzer or an editorship—by following the maxim that living well is the best revenge. Bill Keller and his recent predecessors see it as extending into the so-called special sections of the paper—the sections that increasingly are becoming fundamental to the identity of the Times and to its commercial well-being—the work of a reporter who is, in Keller’s words, “as much a marquee name in the food section as he is in the political pages.” That’s the way Apple sees it.

The change in portfolio has made Apple an unusual figure in Washington. He retains all the trappings associated with members of what is sometimes called the permanent government. He has a house in Georgetown. He has known most of the capital’s principal players for years. (He met George Bush and Al Gore in 1970, when they were serving their fathers as drivers in unsuccessful Senate campaigns; the President, it almost goes without saying, calls him Juanito.) But what he normally writes about day to day is not, say, the future of the North Atlantic alliance but where to find herring that actually tastes like herring. Apple’s friends like to tease him about the switch in subject matter. But they believe that he has emerged triumphant at a time in his career when a lot of reporters who never came in from the field are faced with a choice I used to think of as the Ottawa bureau or the bottle. The byline of R. W. Apple, Jr., still regularly appears in the Times, often on stories from places that make his colleagues muse on what the fanciest hotel there is really like. “He’s got a second act,” Ben Bradlee said of Apple not long ago, “and he probably has others up his sleeve, just in case he eats all the food in the world.”

With R. W. Apple, Jr., triumph is a given. He approaches food writing the same way he approached political reporting or war reporting or parachuting in. In preparation for the Baltimore piece that uncovered the blissful crab cake, he told me, he had reread some Mencken and reread some of Russell Baker’s memoir of growing up in Baltimore and spent a lot of time on the Internet and on the phone. When he wasn’t indulging in one of his three lunches in Baltimore, he was in his room finishing up a piece on the early-twentieth-century East Bay architect Bernard Maybeck (“a precursor of the modern movement like Otto Wagner in Vienna, Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow, Victor Horta in Brussels, and the brothers Charles and Henry Greene in Pasadena”) and a travel piece on Bermuda that began, “When Claudio Vigilante was a waiter at Le Gavroche, the last redoubt of classic French haute cuisine in London . . .”

At the time I spoke to Apple in Gloucestershire, he had sixteen or seventeen notebooks filled with research from the Far East trip, but it seemed likely he’d be interrupted by war in Iraq before he transformed them all into Times stories. The Times’ plans for war coverage included calling him from the table for Q-head duty. When the war started, Apple did return to writing Q-heads—which, as it turned out, drew some of the same sort of criticism that had been directed at him during the Afghanistan campaign. Keller believes that, as the Times allows more analytical writing in news stories, it is becoming less tied to the notion that “every big news event has to be accompanied by a story about what you were supposed to think about that news event.” Still, at the time when war with Iraq seemed imminent, an old Times hand told me that it would probably constitute what the management considered “a Johnny Apple moment.”

By late spring, Apple was mining the notebooks. The Asia trip had been designed to produce eight pieces for the Times, not to speak of a piece on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Gidleigh Park. He had already published a piece on eating dim sum in Hong Kong, but he had before him a piece on Vietnamese pho and a piece on mangosteens in Bangkok and a piece on pepper in Kerala and a piece on Keralan cuisine and a travel piece on Bangkok. A lengthy piece on Singapore street food appeared in the Times earlier this month. The reporting, if that’s the word, had required eighteen eating stops in a single, sixteen-hour day. Cautioned by his guide to taste rather than eat, Apple wrote, “I tried, but I failed. More gourmand than gourmet, I finished much of what was put before me.” Presumably, he will now be referred to by some—maybe even by me—as Eighteen Lunches Apple. Relentlessness remains one of Charlie Plum’s principal charms.